Trump was onto something with his original proposals, and I don’t know if that was a moment of clarity on his part, or just an illustration of the fact that a blind squirrel can find an acorn once in awhile. It may be the former — Trump really doesn’t have a dog in the health insurance fight, because his fortune is based in real estate and not the healthcare industry. If he owned a bunch of health insurance companies instead of hotels, he’d probably have some different (and passionate) ideas on the subject.

His idea of having corporations shoulder a significant portion of the tax burden that would result from a single payer system isn’t a bad one. Corporations are bearing a lot of our country’s healthcare costs now, through providing health insurance benefits for their employees. If that burden was removed, but replaced with their being taxed at — oh, say…half the amount that they were paying for health insurance benefits, would they jump at that deal? Most would.

And let’s not forget that one of the reasons our country spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country on the planet is profit for insurance companies. Get rid of the profit, and that trims a lot of cost out of the chain. Does this mean that all health insurance companies should go out of business, considering the impact that might have on our economy? Admittedly, we wouldn’t have a great need for the bloated health insurance industry we have now. However, there will probably always be a role for some kind of health insurance, to provide benefits that might not be covered under a government-paid single payer system, such as elective surgeries and the like.